As the final talk of my trip to the East Coast, I will be speaking to the RubyNation conference in Reston, Virginia on Saturday, April 10th. I worked in Reston back when the unofficial motto was "We're not dead, we're Reston." Things have livened up considerably since then and I'm looking forward to connecting with some old friends and colleagues while I am in the area.

There will be a Mechanical Turk
Meetup in New York at 6:00 PM on April 13th. Learn more about Mechanical Turk's global
on-demand workforce, discover best practices, talk to existing
Requesters, and mingle with members of the Mechanical Turk team.
Preregister here.

Terry Wise, Director of Business Development for the Amazon Web
Services, will be speaking at PegaWORLD in Philadelphia on
April 26th. Terry will talk about how Tenet Healthcare
uses Pega’s Cloud Computing solution to radically improve the way it
builds its business process applications, reducing delivery time and
cost by a factor of 5. Discount registrations for the conference are
available here.

-- Jeff;

PS - Despite the route implied by my map, I will be traveling by plane and train!

I'd like to call your attention to a new feature that we rolled out earlier this month. You can now provide us with a configurable Reverse DNS record for any of your Elastic IP addresses. Once you've supplied us with the record, reverse DNS lookups (from IP address to domain name) will work as expected: the Elastic IP address in question will resolve to the domain that you specified in the record.

If you are using an EC2 instance to send email, you'll appreciate this one. Some other types of applications and protocols (FTP and Secure FTP come to mind), can also benefit from it, but most of our customers have asked for it after they tried to send email from Amazon EC2.

You can provide us with your Reverse DNS records using this form. We'll set up the mappings as quickly as possible and we'll send you an email once everything is all set up.

We count on our customers to provide us with the feedback needed to assign the proper priority to this and to other features. We're always happy to hear from you; send your feature requests to awseditor@amazon.com and I'll make sure that they are routed directly to the proper team.

Prior to our planned launch of an AWS Region in Singapore, we've opened up our third Amazon CloudFront edge location in Asia, joining the existing locations in Hong Kong and Tokyo, for a total of fifteen locations world-wide. The new Singapore edge location will reduce latency for end users in Singapore and throughout Southeast Asia. Static content will appear more quickly; dynamic (streamed) content will start to stream more quickly and may even be smoother.

No application changes are needed to take advantage of this new edge location because CloudFront will automatically locate the best edge location and serve the content from it. Pricing for the Singapore edge location is the same as for the Hong Kong location.

We've also added support for private, streamed content to CloudFront. Many of our customers want to sell or to secure their video content and they'll be able to do this now. Private streamed content works in much the same way that it does for HTTP content, as I described last year. You can protect content by combining dates, date ranges, IP addresses, and IP address ranges. This new feature is available at no additional charge and you can start using it today by reading the CloudFront documentation.

We've been working with a number of application and toolkit developers to make sure that the tool and toolkit support for private streamed content is ready. Here's what I know about:

When we talk about AWS with potential users, they often ask if Windows Server is available. As you know, we've supported Windows Server 2003 for a while, and we recently added support for Windows Server 2008. Once we've let them know that they can run Windows Server and their existing Microsoft Windows applications on Amazon EC2, the larger customers often tell us that they've already set up an Enterprise Agreement (EA) with Microsoft, and ask if it can be applied to EC2 instances.

As of today, the answer is now a conditional (yet still enthusiastic) - "Yes!"

Under a new Microsoft pilot program, you can bring your EA Windows Server licenses into the cloud, activate them, and then launch Amazon EC2 instances running Microsoft Windows Server for the same price as Linux/UNIX On-Demand or Reserved Instance .

Enrollment starts today and will continue until September 23, 2010, so it is important to act fast. Your participation and feedback will have a definite impact on the long-term prospects for this pilot program.

To participate in the pilot, Microsoft requires that your company meets the following criteria:

Your company must be based (or have a legal entity) in the United States.

Your company must have an existing Microsoft Enterprise Agreement that does not expire within 12 months of your entry into the Pilot.

You must already have purchased Software Assurance from Microsoft for your EA Windows Server licenses.

You must be an Enterprise customer (Academic and Government institutions are not covered by this pilot).

Once enrolled, you can move your Enterprise Agreement Windows Server Standard, Windows Server Enterprise, or Windows Server Datacenter Edition licenses to Amazon EC2 for 1 year. Each of your Windows Server Standard licenses will let you launch one EC2 instance. Each of your Windows Server Enterprise or Windows Server Datacenter licenses will let you launch up to four EC2 instances. In either case, you can use any of the EC2 instance types. The licenses you bring to EC2 can only be moved between EC2 and your on-premises machines every 90 days. You can use your licenses in the US East (Northern Virginia) or US West (Northern California) Regions. You will still be responsible for maintaining your Client Access Licenses and External Connector licenses appropriately.

To apply for this program, dig up your Enterprise Agreement Number and fill out the Windows License Mobility Form. We'll verify your eligibility with Microsoft, and then we'll need you to sign some paperwork and return it to us. We'll do some final checking, pass the paperwork along to Microsoft, and we'll enable your AWS account for the program. We've set up SLAs for each step to make it possible to have you up and running in less than two weeks.

Operationally, you'll use a couple of new EC2 APIs (ActivateLicense, DeactivateLicense, and DescribeLicenses) to tell us how many licenses you'd like to use for EC2. The ActivateLicense and DescribeLicenses requests will return a "License Pool" that you'll use in an EC2 RunInstances request, which will activate an EC2 instance using your license and at the lower price.

Kimbro and Sean at JumpBox have been breaking a lot of new ground as they strive to make it even easier to run a wide variety of open source applications in a service-oriented fashion.

I spent some time talking to Sean yesterday and he walked me through their latest step into the self-service, push-button world of the future. They've streamlined and simplified the process of launching a good-sized catalog of useful applications on Amazon EC2.

Once you've created your JumpBox account and entered your AWS Security Credentials, you can launch a polished and easy to manage application with just a few clicks. Let's say that your boss (or your spouse) says "Jeff, we need a wiki of our very own, and we need it now!" You browse through the JumpBox catalog and decide that the MoinMoin wiki is just the thing:

You click on the Launch on Amazon EC2 link and log in to JumpBox. You confirm your intent, and the EC2 instance is launched and ready to go in a few minutes:

As you can see from the final screen shot, the next step is to access the configuration page for the JumpBox:

You fill in the form and you are all set. The final page provides you with links to the admin page for your Wiki and for the JumpBox Administration Portal running on the instance:

Your wiki is all set and you are a hero:

You can use the Administration Portal to manage backups and restores, naming, and much more:

Once you've supplied your AWS Credentials, backups can be scheduled to occur at any desired frequency:

You can restore any of the backups to the same instance of the Wiki or to an entirely new one:

You'll receive a confirmation email after you've finished setting up your JumpBox. The email includes all of the URLs needed to access, administer, and shut down the instance. I think they've pretty much thought of everything.

This looks pretty cool and I think that it will give lots of folks a jump-start into the cloud. Check out the application catalog and give it a spin.

I am very happy to announce the new AWS SDK for Java. Java Developers can use this SDK to build powerful AWS applications. We have also updated our AWS Toolkit for Eclipse and together with the SDK, developers can easily use the powerful Eclipse IDE to build new AWS-powered Java applications.

Amazon S3's new Versioning feature has now graduated to production status! Once you have enabled versioning for a particular S3 bucket, you can create a new version of an object by simply uploading it. The old versions continue to exist and remain accessible.

Versioning's MFA Delete feature has also graduated to production status. Once enabled for an S3 bucket, each version deletion request must include the six-digit code and serial number from your MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) device.

I found some pictures from a few years ago, sorted them into chronological order, turned on versioning for one of my S3 buckets, and uploaded each of the pictures to the same S3 object, creating a series of versions.

The first of the pictures can be seen at right (wasn't I cute?).

Here's a complete list of the versions for this object. Each one is linked to a particular version of the picture:

Register for this webinar to learn how to effectively manage large grid processing jobs on AWS with RightScale's cloud management platform. In this webinar RightScale will do a live demonstration of how a hedge fund would run a complete scalable grid application environment that is automated, resilient to errors, and auditable.

You'll learn about the challenges involved in scaling out Java apps in the cloud, and how EC2 can be used with Terracotta to cluster and scale-out all of the core components of Java apps including web sessions, caches, ORM, and job scheduling - by simply including the right jar files and setting a few lines of XML config. We'll demo this simple way to scale, and answer your questions.

Learn how you can protect your mission-critical applications in the
public cloud, while satisfying the most stringent security and
availability requirements at a fraction of traditional data center
investments.

Attend this webinar to learn how to shorten your time to market and launch your game on AWS using RightScale's cloud management platform. Learn how several major gaming publishers, such as Playfish and Zynga, have used RightScale and AWS to power their highly-elastic social game applications. We will provide insight into launching your first game, avoiding common scaling problems, and automating your sys admin tasks.

Please join us for the half-day start-up project event, featuring Amazon.com CTO Dr. Werner Vogels, and learn how to be successful with Amazon Web Services – utilizing the same robust infrastructure and technological resources that power Amazon.com’s global web properties. We will show entrepreneurs, technologists, and business leaders how to get started with AWS infrastructure services and how to architect applications for the cloud.

You can now send us a "raw" or internal SATA drive all by itself, with no need for an enclosure. You don't have to send connectors, cables, or power cords. Raw SATA drives appear to be the most cost-effective way to send large amounts of data from place to place.

If you have a SATA cradle (I use this one at home; others have told me that they like this one), you can connect the drive to your desktop machine without having to open up the enclosure.

Also, you can now send us drives with capacities up to 4 TB. Customers with the need to import or export large amounts of data will reduce the number of devices needed.